A perfectionist at the head of a team: how your standards affect people

“Send it to me before it goes out. I just want to take a look.”

It is eleven at night. The presentation for the board was prepared by a colleague everyone in the company trusts, and it is good. But when you open it, you notice that the font on slide fourteen is a touch smaller than elsewhere. That the second chart could be drawn more clearly. That one sentence in the summary is too cautious. By half past one in the morning, the presentation is yours. Your colleague will open it in the morning, see all the changes and say nothing. Next time, though, she will send it to you even earlier — unfinished, because she knows you will rework it anyway.

Many people who lead others will recognise this scene. We often experience it not as a problem but as a virtue: “I just have high standards.” In this post I would like to look at what happens when perfectionism moves out of one person’s head and into the team that person leads. Not in order to lower the standards, but to understand what happens to them on their way to people.

High standards and perfectionism are not the same thing

First, a distinction without which this topic cannot be discussed. High standards mean you want work done well and are willing to make an effort for it. Perfectionism is something else: it is the belief that a mistake is proof you are not enough, and that only a flawless result is acceptable. High standards settle down once the work is done well. Perfectionism never settles — as soon as one thing is finished, it immediately finds the next thing that isn’t.

In the early 1990s, psychologists Paul Hewitt and Gordon Flett described perfectionism as having three directions. Self-oriented means you demand flawlessness from yourself. Other-oriented means you demand it from others. Socially prescribed means you are convinced that others demand it from you — and that they will reject you if you are not perfect.

In leaders, all three often appear at once. You push yourself because you feel judged by the board, the owners or the public, and that pressure then travels down the hierarchy to the people you lead. What was once your inner voice becomes the culture of the department.

What has happened to perfectionism over three decades

In 2019, Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill published a meta-analysis comparing the scores of more than 41,000 students from the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada, collected between 1989 and 2016. All three directions of perfectionism rose over time, and socially prescribed perfectionism rose most — by roughly a third. Young people are increasingly convinced that those around them expect perfection.

Why does this matter to someone who leads? Because the people joining your team today grew up in a world where a grade was always close at hand — at school, on social media, in university admissions. Many of them arrive already carrying a quiet fear that they are not enough. When that fear meets a leader who corrects every comma, it does not shrink. It gets confirmed.

This does not mean you have to be softer on content. It does mean your words land on ground that has already been loosened. The same comment you would have shrugged off in your twenties may today keep someone awake until three in the morning.

Micromanagement as a sedative

When I talk with leaders about micromanagement, almost no one says they do it because they don’t trust people. They say: “I just want it to be right.” And that is true. But if you look more closely at what happens in the moment you open your colleague’s presentation at eleven at night, you often find that it is less about the presentation than about your own unease.

In that moment, checking works as a sedative. Until you have looked yourself, anxiety hums inside you: what if something is wrong, what if the board notices, what if it falls on me. Once you have looked and corrected, the anxiety settles for a few hours. That is why the behaviour repeats — not because it is necessary, but because it brings relief. I wrote about how perfectionism and constant rumination grow from the same root in Perfectionism and overthinking: two sides of the same fear.

The trouble is that someone else pays for the relief. You are calm for that evening, but your colleague has lost something no correction will give back: the sense that the work is hers.

What the team sees: psychological safety

In the mid-1990s, Amy Edmondson of Harvard studied medication errors on hospital wards. She expected better-led wards to report fewer errors. The opposite happened: where relationships were better, more errors were reported. Not because more were made, but because people dared to speak about them. On wards with a strict, punitive manager, errors stayed hidden — and so no one learned anything from them.

From this finding grew a concept that almost every leadership school now teaches: psychological safety. It is the shared belief within a team that you can speak up, ask a question, admit a mistake or suggest something unusual without being humiliated or punished for it. It is not about niceness, nor about low demands. A team can be very demanding and very safe at the same time.

A perfectionist at the head of a team often erodes psychological safety not through harshness but through silence. They don’t shout, they don’t humiliate anyone. They simply correct. And people read a rule from it: better to show nothing until it is perfect — or not to show anything at all. I described how early attachment patterns shape the way we experience a boss and what we dare to say in front of them in Attachment at work: how the pattern shows with your manager and colleagues.

A cycle that feeds itself

When perfectionism settles into leadership, a cycle often develops that is hard to see from the inside. You correct because the work isn’t good enough. Because you correct, people stop investing in the last ten per cent — why would they, if it will pass through your hands anyway? Because they stop investing, the work really is worse. And that confirms to you that you have to correct.

Meanwhile your workload slowly grows. In the end you are not leading a team; you are its last and only filter. And the team has lost what shows up in no report: initiative.

Research confirms that this investment does not pay off. In a 2018 meta-analysis of studies on perfectionism at work, Dana Harari and colleagues found that perfectionism is not related to better job performance. It is, however, related to more stress, burnout, workaholism and anxiety. Two years earlier, Andrew Hill and Thomas Curran had shown that the part of perfectionism revolving around worry and fear of mistakes is among the stronger personality predictors of burnout.

Where the voice saying “not yet good enough” comes from

In relational family therapy, in which I am training, we are interested in where a person learned what they are worth. Perfectionism is rarely born at work. More often a person brings it from a family where love, or at least attention, was tied to achievement — where top marks meant peace at dinner, and a slightly lower mark meant the question “And what happened to the rest?”

A child like that does not grow into a person who wants to do good work. They grow into a person who uses good work to buy the right to exist. And when such a person becomes a leader, something unusual often happens: the same voice they once heard from a parent is no longer aimed only inwards but also at the people they are responsible for. Not out of cruelty. Because they know no other language for care. I wrote more about that voice in The inner critic: where the voice that constantly judges you comes from, and about the link between worth and productivity in When you are worth only what you produce.

In a session, such a conversation might unfold something like this (composite, not a real person):

“I don’t understand why they won’t take responsibility. I have to do everything myself.”
“What happens when one of them hands something in on their own, without you?”
“Usually I have to fix it afterwards.”
“And how do you think they feel when they see the corrections?”
Silence. “Probably the way I felt when my father read my school report.”
“What was that like?”
“As if everything I had done was only a first draft.”

In a moment like that, the topic shifts. We are no longer talking about the team, but about where such a strong need for control comes from — and what would happen if something were left uncorrected.

Exercise: auditing one correction

This exercise does not ask you to give up your standards. It only asks you to look closely, once, at what happens when you correct. Do it with the next piece of work someone hands you for review.

1. Before you open the document, write down one number from 0 to 10: how uneasy you are right now. Not about the work, just in general.
2. Read the work to the end without changing anything. Only note your corrections on a separate sheet.
3. Mark each correction with a letter. N (necessary) if without it there would be a factual error, a delay or harm. P (preference) if it is about your taste, style or a feeling that it could be nicer.
4. Return the work to the author with the N corrections only. Leave the rest. If there really are many P’s, offer them as suggestions, not tasks.
5. In the evening, write down your unease number again and one sentence: what happened because you didn’t correct something. Often you will find that nothing happened — except that your unease was louder for a few hours.

Repeat this a few times and you will see two things: how many of your corrections are really about style, and how your unease is connected to what you do with other people’s work. Both are valuable, because they show you where quality ends and anxiety begins.

When high standards are not the problem

It would not be fair if this post gave the impression that every demanding leader is a perfectionist and every correction is micromanagement. There are circumstances in which precision is essential and oversight is responsibility, not anxiety.

• Fields with no room for error. In aviation, healthcare, financial compliance or construction, checking procedures are justified. There it is not about your feelings but about people’s safety. The difference is that the rules there are agreed and the same for everyone, not dependent on your mood at eleven at night.
• When the team genuinely can’t manage. Sometimes the problem is that people lack the knowledge or the resources, or that someone is in the wrong role. Then the answer is not to stop correcting, but a conversation, onboarding or a different allocation of work.
• When the problem is the organisation. If a department is chronically understaffed or deadlines are impossible, late-night correcting is born not of perfectionism but of a system that doesn’t work. Then personal work on yourself will help less than a conversation upwards.
• When checking becomes a compulsion. If you check even when you know everything is right, and feel severe anxiety while doing it, something may have developed that belongs with a doctor. A conversation with your GP or a psychiatrist is a sensible first step — no post, this one included, can make a diagnosis.

So the question is not whether you have high standards. The question is whether they apply to the work or to the person — and whether they ever settle once the work is done well.

What you can do differently this week

Changing how you lead does not mean becoming someone else. It means a few small shifts that tell people it is safe to show you something unfinished.

Say in advance what good enough looks like. When you hand over a task, describe what the work must contain and what you consider unnecessary. People who don’t know where the line is try to guess it — or give up.

Let the author make the corrections. Instead of reworking it yourself, say what bothers you and hand the work back. It is slower, but people stay the owners of their work.

Show your own mistake. Nothing builds psychological safety as quickly as a leader who says in a meeting: “I got this wrong, here is how I fixed it.” You don’t lose standing. You give people permission.

Praise the process, not only the result. “Good that you showed me this early” is worth more to a team’s culture than “great presentation”.

Treat yourself the way you would want your team to be treated. Research on self-compassion suggests that a kinder attitude to your own mistakes does not reduce commitment, but often increases your willingness to learn from them. More on this in Self-compassion instead of self-criticism: what Kristin Neff’s research shows.

If, alongside all this, you recognise yourself in a constant sense that it is never enough, no matter how much you achieve, you might also read The never-enough syndrome: achievement at the top that brings no peace.

Why work on this in therapy

Perfectionism cannot be switched off by a decision. The voice that says “not yet good enough” is often as old as you are, and it once made sense — it protected you from disappointment, criticism or the feeling of not being seen. Once you understand it, it usually doesn’t fall silent overnight, but it loses some of its power.

In sessions we don’t work on how to become a less demanding leader. We work on what drives your need for everything to be right, and what kind of relationships that creates — at home and at work. It often turns out that the same pattern repeats with a partner or with children, only there are no reports there in which you would notice it.

What to remember

• High standards settle down after good work; perfectionism doesn’t. That is the simplest way to tell them apart.
• Micromanagement often soothes not quality but your anxiety — and the team pays the price.
• Psychological safety does not mean low demands. It means people dare to show a mistake before it grows large.
• According to research, perfectionism is not linked to better performance, but it is linked to burnout.
• The cycle is easiest to break at the first step: with a clear “good enough” and corrections made by the author.